New service development at the multinational level

Abstract

Services representativeness in the world economy, in terms of global output, employment and trade, has been growing, due to globalization, economy’s deregulation, and fierce competition. This tendency of trading services changed the traditional economic scenario. It opened up markets that until that moment were closed, which enabled the appearance of new internal and external actors, and forced firms to start focusing on differentiation, flexibility and cost awareness. To remain competitive in the market, firms had to innovate their products, offering new or supplementary services, which over time, represent a significant part of firm’s sales. Moreover, the current world crisis scenario combined with saturation of domestic markets, encouraged firms to expand its businesses to other countries. Thus, the purpose of this study is to conduct a literature review, investigating how firms develop new services at the multinational level. This study begins with defining what are new services and how firms develop them. Based on innovation literature, it is adopted a definition of new services. Then, through the New Service Development (NSD) process literature, it is suggested that firms should establish a systematic NSD process, encompassing distinct stages, interactive and non-sequential. At the multinational level, it is recognized that distinct countries differ in terms of innovation, strategies, processes and managers attitudes. However, the literature review did not allow finding a systematic process to be adopted in the development of new services, simultaneously, in more than one country, neither in terms of process standardization, nor in terms of process design. Finally, it is explored the field of service design, where it is presented the concepts of service architecture and service modularity. It is also proposed a framework to support future investigation regarding service architecture.

Date of Award	May 2012
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Sofia Salgado (Supervisor)